‘You’ve lost again, you idiot!’ shouted a bass male voice on the first floor.
They must have been playing cards. I reached the edge of the building, turned round the corner and found myself in a back yard, which proved to be unexpectedly picturesque - several steps away from the wall the ground fell away steeply, forming a natural depression concealed beneath the shade of the trees that overhung it. A babbling brook ran through the dip and I could see the roofs of two or three outbuildings, while further off, in a small open area, there was a tall stack of hay, exactly like those depicted in the idyllic rural scenes to be found in the journal Niva. I felt a sudden, crazy desire to tumble in the hay, and I set off towards the stack. Then suddenly, when I was only ten paces away from it, a man with a rifle leapt out from beneath the trees and barred my way.
Standing before me was the very same Bashkir who had served us dinner in the staff car and then uncoupled the weavers’ carriages from our train, but now his face was covered by a sparse black beard.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘we know each other, don’t we? All I want to do is take a roll in the hay. I promise you not to smoke.’
The Bashkir did not react to my words in any way; his eyes gazed at me without the slightest trace of expression. I attempted to walk round him, and then he stepped backwards, raised his rifle and set the bayonet against my throat.
I turned and walked away. I must confess that there was something in the Bashkir’s manner which I found genuinely Irightening. When he pointed his bayonet at me he had gripped his rifle as though it were a spear, as if he had no notion that one could shoot from it, and the movement had hinted at such wild strength born of the steppe that the Browning in my pocket had seemed no more than a simple child’s firecracker. But it was all surely no more than nerves. When I reached the brook I looked back, but the Bashkir was no longer anywhere to be seen. I squatted down by the water and carefully washed my astrakhan hat in it.
Suddenly I noticed that the murmuring of the brook was overlaid, like the strains of some obscure instrument, by the tones of a low, rather pleasant-sounding voice. In the building nearest to me which, judging from the chimney in its roof, had once been a bathhouse, someone was intoning:
‘Calmly I walk the open field in my white shirt… And the storks are like the crosses on the bell towers.’
Something in these words moved me, and I decided to see who was singing. Wringing the water from my hat, I thrust it into my belt, walked across to the door and swung it open without knocking.
Inside there was a wide table made of freshly planed boards and two benches. On the table stood an immense bottle containing a turbid liquid, a glass and several onions. Sitting on the nearer of the benches with his back to me was a man wearing a white Russian shirt hanging loose outside his trousers.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I asked, ‘but is that not perhaps vodka in your bottle?’
‘No,’ said the man, turning round as he spoke, ‘this is moonshine.’
It was Chapaev.
I started in surprise. ‘Vasily Ivanovich!’
‘Hi there, Petka,’ he answered with a broad smile. ‘Back on your feet already, I see.’
I had absolutely no memory of when we had moved on to such familiar terms. Chapaev glanced at me with gentle cunning; a damp lock of hair had fallen across his forehead and his shirt was unbuttoned down to the middle of his belly. His appearance was so absolutely ordinary and so far removed from the image that I carried in my memory that I hesitated for several seconds, thinking it was a mistake.
‘Siddown, Petka, siddown.’ he said, nodding towards the other bench.
‘I thought you were out of town, Vasily Ivanovich,’ I said as I took a seat.
‘I got back an hour ago.’ he said, ‘and came straight to the bathhouse. Just the job in this heat. But why are you asking about me, tell me about yourself. How’re you feeling?’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Gets up just like that, puts on his hat and goes off into town. You should stop playing the bleeding hero. What’s this talk I hear about your losing your memory somewhere?’
‘1 have,’ I said, trying not to pay any attention to his buffoonery and perverse use of uncultured language. ‘But who could have told you already?’
‘Why Semyon, who else? Your orderly. You really can’t remember anything then, eh?’
‘All I remember is getting into the train in Moscow,’ I said. ‘Everything after that is a blank. I cannot even recall under what circumstances you began calling me Petka.’
Chapaev stared me in the face for a minute or so with his eyes screwed up, as though he were looking straight through me.
‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘I see. A bad business. I reckon that you, Petka, are simply muddying the water.’
‘What water?’
‘Carry on muddying it if you like,’ Chapaev said mysteriously, ‘you’re still young yet. And I began calling you Petka at Lozovaya Junction, not long before the battle.’
‘I know nothing of this battle,’ I said, frowning. ‘I keep hearing about it all the time, but I cannot remember a single thing. It just makes my head start aching.’
‘Well, if it makes your head ache, don’t think about it. You wanted a drink, didn’t you? So have one!’
Tipping the bottle Chapaev filled the glass to the brim and pushed it across to me.
‘Many thanks,’ I said ironically and drank. Despite its frightening murky sheen, the moonshine proved to be quite excellent - it must have been distilled with some kind of herbs.
‘Like some onion?’
‘Not at the moment. But I do not rule out the possibility that in a while I might indeed reach a state in which I am able and even eager to chew onions with my moonshine.’
‘Why so down in the dumps?’ asked Chapaev.
‘Oh, just thoughts.’
‘And what thoughts might they be?’
‘Surely, Vasily Ivanovich, you cannot really be interested m what I am thinking?’
‘Why not?’ said Chapaev. ‘Of course I am.’
‘I am thinking, Vasily Ivanovich, that the love of a beautiful woman is always in reality a kind of condescension. Because it is simply impossible to be worthy of such a love.’
‘You what?’ said Chapaev, wrinkling up his forehead.
‘Enough of this swaggering foolery,’ I said, ‘I am being serious.’
‘Serious are you?’ asked Chapaev. ‘All right then, try this for size - condescension is always movement down from something to something else. Like down into this little gully here. So where does this condescension of yours go to - and from where?’
I started thinking about it. I could see what he was getting at: if I had said that I was talking about the condescension of the beautiful to the ugly and the suffering, he would immediately have asked me whether beauty is aware of itself, and whether it can remain beauty having once become conscious of itself in that capacity. To that question, which had driven me almost insane through long sleepless nights in St Petersburg, I had no answer. And if the beauty I was speaking of was a beauty unconscious of itself, then there could surely be no talk of condescension? Chapaev was very definitely far from simple.
‘Let us say, Vasily Ivanovich, not the condescension of something to something else, but the act of condescension in itself. I would even call it ontological condescension.’
‘And where exactly does this an-ta-logical condescension happen, then?’ asked Chapaev, obviously relishing his mimicry. He took another glass from under the table.
‘I am not prepared to converse in that tone.’
‘Let’s have another drink, then.’ said Chapaev.
We drank. I stared dubiously at an onion for several seconds.
‘But really.’ said Chapaev, wiping his moustache, ‘you tell me where it all happens.’
‘If you are in a fit state to talk seriously, Vasily Ivanovich, then I will tell you.’
‘Go on then, tell me.’
&nb
sp; ‘It would be more correct to say that there is no condescension involved. It is simply that such love is felt as condescension.’
‘And which parts is it felt in?’
‘In the m i n d, Vasily Ivanovich, in the perception of the conscious mind.’ I said sarcastically.
‘Ah, in simple terms you mean here in the head, right?’
‘Roughly speaking, yes.’
‘And where does the love happen?’
‘In the same place, Vasily Ivanovich. Roughly speaking.’
‘Right.’ said Chapaev in a satisfied voice. ‘So you were asking about, what was it now… Whether love is always condescension, right?’
‘Correct.’
‘And it seems that love takes place inside your head, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is that condescension too?’
‘So it appears, Vasily Ivanovich. What of it?’
‘Tell me, Petka, how on earth you have managed to get yourself into a state where you ask me, your commanding officer, whether what happens in your head is always what happens in your head, or not always?’
‘Sophistry,’ I said and drank. ‘Unadulterated sophistry. And anyway, I cannot understand why I continue to torment myself. I have endured all this before in St Petersburg, and the beautiful young woman in the maroon velvet dress set her empty goblet on the tablecloth in exactly the same fashion and I took my handkerchief out of my pocket in exactly the same way-’
Chapaev cleared his throat loudly, drowning out what I was saying. I finished in a quiet voice, not quite sure to whom I was actually speaking:
‘What do I want from this girl? Am I not aware that one can never return to the past? One might skilfully reproduce all of his external circumstances, but one can never recover one’s former self, never…’
‘Oi-oi, you spin a very fine line in garbage, Petka.’ Chapaev said with a laugh. ‘Goblet, tablecloth.’
‘What is wrong with you, Vasily Ivanovich,’ I asked, restraining myself with some difficulty. ‘Have you been rereading Tolstoy? Have you decided to become more simple?’
‘We’ve no need to reread any of your Tolstoys.’ said Chapaev, chuckling again. ‘But if you’re pining because of our Лпка, then I can tell you that every woman has to be approached in the right way. Pining away for our Anka, are you? Have I guessed right?’
His eyes had become two narrow slits of cunning. Then he suddenly struck the table with his fist.
‘You answer when your divisional commander asks you a question!’
There was definitely no way I was going to be able to break through his strange mood today.
‘It is of no importance.’ I said. ‘Vasily Ivanovich, let us have another drink.’
Chapaev laughed quietly and filled both glasses.
My memories of the hours which followed are rather vague. I got very drunk. I think we talked about soldiering -Chapaev was reminiscing about the Great War. He made it sound quite convincing: he spoke about the German cavalry, about some positions above some river, about gas attacks and mills with machine-gunners sitting in them. At one point he even became very excited and began shouting, glaring at me with gleaming eyes:
‘Ah, Petka! D’you know the way I fight? You can’t know any thing about that! Chapaev uses only three blows, you understand me?’
I nodded mechanically, but I was listening carefully.
The first blow is where!’
He struck the table so hard with his fist that the bottle almost toppled over.
‘The second is when!’
Again he smote the boards of the table.
‘And the third is who!’
In a different situation I would have appreciated this performance, but despite all his shouting and striking the table, I soon fell asleep right there on the bench; when I awoke it was already dark outside and somewhere in the distance I could hear sheep bleating.
I lifted my head from the table and surveyed the room - I felt as though I were in a cab drivers’ tavern somewhere in St Petersburg. A paraffin lamp had appeared on the table. Chapaev was still sitting opposite me holding his glass, humming something to himself and staring at the wall. His eyes were almost as clouded as the moonshine in the bottle, which was already half-empty. Perhaps I should talk with him in his own manner, I thought, and thumped the table with my fist in a gesture of exaggerated familiarity.
‘Tell me now, Vasily Ivanovich, straight from the heart. Are you a Red or a White?’
‘Me?’ asked Chapaev, shifting his gaze to me. ‘You want to know?’
He picked up two onions from the table and began cleaning them. One of them he cleaned until its flesh was white, but from the other he removed only the dry outer skin, exposing the reddish-purple layer underneath.
‘Look here, Petka,’ he said, placing them on the table in front of him. «There are two onions in front of you, one white, the other red.’
‘Well,’ I said.
‘Look at the white one.’
‘I am looking at it’
‘And now at the red one,’
‘Yes, what of it?’
‘Now look at both of them.’
‘I am looking,’ I said.
‘So which are you, red or white?’
‘Me? How do you mean?’
‘When you look at the red onion, do you turn red?’
‘No.’
‘And when you look at the white onion, do you turn white?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I do not.’
‘Let’s proceed then,’ said Chapaev. ‘There are such things as topographical maps. And this table is a simplified map of consciousness. There are the Reds. And there are the Whites. But just because we’re aware of Reds and Whites, do we take on any colours? And what is there in you that can take them on?’
‘You are deliberately confusing things, Vasily Ivanovich. If we are not Reds and not Whites, then just who are we?’
‘Petka, before you try talking about complicated questions, you should settle the simple ones. «We» is more complicated lhan «I», isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I said.
‘What do you call «I»?’
‘Clearly, myself
‘Can you tell me who you are?’
‘Pyotr Voyd.’
‘That’s your name. But who is it bears that name?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘one could say that I am a psychological individual. A totality of habits, experience… And knowledge and preferences.’
‘And just whose are these habits, Petka?’ Chapaev asked forcefully.
‘Mine,’ I shrugged.
‘But you just said yourself, Petka, that you are a totality of habits. If they are your habits, does that mean that these habits belong to a totality of habits?’
‘It sounds funny,’ I said, ‘but in essence, that is the case.’
‘And what kind of habits do habits have?’
I began to feel irritated.
‘This entire conversation is rather primitive. We began, after all, from the question of who I am, of what my nature is. If you have no objection, then I regard myself as… Well, let us say, a monad. In Leibniz’s sense of the word.’
‘Then just who is it who goes around regarding himself as this gonad?’
‘The monad itself.’ replied, determined to maintain a grip on myself.
Good, said Chapaev, screwing up his eyes in a cunning fashion, well talk about who later. But first, my dear friend, let us deal with where. Tell me, where’s it live, this gonad of yours.’
‘In my consciousness.’
‘And where is your consciousness’
‘Right here, I said, tapping myself on the head.’
‘And where is your head?’
‘On my shoulders.’
‘And where are your shoulders?’
‘In a room.’
‘And where is the room?’
‘In a building.’
‘And where is the building?’
‘In
Russia.’
‘And where is Russia?’
‘In the deepest trouble, Vasily Ivanovich.’
‘Stop that,’ he shouted seriously. You can joke when your commander orders you to. Answer.’
‘Well, of course, on the Earth.’
‘And where is the Earth?’
‘In the Universe.’
‘And where is the Universe?’
I thought for a second.
‘In itself.’
‘And where is this in itself?’
In my consciousness.’
‘Well then, Petka, that means your consciousness is in your consciousness, doesn’t it?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Right,’ said Chapaev, straightening his moustache. ‘Now listen to me carefully. Tell me, what place is it in?’
‘I do not understand, Vasily Ivanovich. The concept of place is one o the categories o consciousness, and so…
‘Where is this place? In what place is this concept of place located?’
‘Well now, let us say that it is not really a place. We could-’ I stopped dead. Yes, I thought, that is where he is leading me. If I use the word reality, he will reduce everything to my own thoughts once again. And then he will ask where they are located. I will tell him they are in my head, and then… A good gambit. Of course, I could resort to quotations, but then, I thought in astonishment, any of the systems which I can cite either sidesteps this breach in the logic of thought or plugs it with a couple of dubious Latinisms. Yes, Chapaev was very far indeed from being simple. Of course, there is always the foolproof method of concluding any argument by pigeon-holing your opponent - nothing could be easier than to declare that everything he is trying to demonstrate is already well known under such-and-such a name, and human thought has advanced a long way since then. But I felt ashamed to behave like some self-satisfied evening-class student who has leafed ahead through a few pages of the philosophy textbook during breaks. And had not I myself only recently told some St Petersburg philosopher, who had launched into a drunken discussion of the Greek roots of Russian communism, that philosophy would be better called sophisilly?
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